Library Quotes

What are these things that this houses, Eva?" Rovender picked up a crumbling tome. He handed it to her."These are books," Eva said as the yellowed bits of paper flaked away in her hands to rest on the floor. "It's what humans used to put all of their writing in long ago.

I won't be sad too often,If they bury me in the libraryWith bookworms in my coffin.

Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.

-Mikhail?...Try making suggestions next time, or just plain asking. You go do whatever it is you're doing, and I'll go search you extensive library for a book on manners.-You will not find it.-Why am I not surprised?

What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.

You can learn from a glance at anyone's library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.

I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.

I have always imagined that paradise will be some kind of library. - Jorge Luis Borges, “Poems of the Gifts

Lord Peter's library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the Sèvres vases on the chimneypiece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums. To the eyes of the young man who was ushered in from the raw November fog it seemed not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediæval painting

In the Library you took your good times where you could find them.

I've always said, stuff the engagement ring! Just build me a really big library.

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.

Standing before the worn books and dusty shelves, she seemed like a ray of light in the windowless room.

The atmosphere of the place soothed her automatically; the rich lantern lights, the sheer scent of paper and leather, and the fact that everywhere she looked, there were books, books, beautiful books.

We exist in the world of books.

Book should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?

Perhaps, Katrine, in a library just like this one, you will find that all the things you thought were impossible and all the things that everyone, throughout history, have thought were impossible are not really impossible at all... they never were impossible.

The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.

I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is not the case; its roots are a bit more academic.

There’s a vast fraternity of record collectors, and the record store was their hub. There was not a lot of information on these groups or the labels so you’d gather [there] and it would be like a library. - Lenny Kaye quoted

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.

The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.'Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?'That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap.

And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The library became my sanctuary. I loved the ways the precious stories took shape but always had room to be read again. I became fascinated with how writers did that. How did they make a story feel so complete and yet to open-ended? It was like painting a picture that changed each time you looked at it.

Sis took Eva to the public library and showed her how to get a card. Every week, Eva read her way through the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Elizabeth Gaskell. She dreamed of heroines from modest backgrounds attracting unprecedented attentions, soaring tales of love across social divides and sudden unexpected reversals of fortunes. In these pages, anything was possible, even for a girl like her.

An even more pointed example of the the power of the silence tabu in libraries occurred in Duluth in 1981. The police were pursuing a fugitive from justice who ran into the public library. Uniformed police surrounded the building, and the library director was notified that only unobtrusive plainclothesmen were entering the building. Their instructions: “When you find him, overpower him. Quietly.” It was done, and only a few people in the crowded building saw a handcuffed man being ushered past the checkout counter. “See,” one librarian remarked quietly to an amazed person, “that’s what happens when you don’t pay your book fines.

No more looking at a wall and pretending it's a mirror. No more shelving fiction in the non-fiction section. No more thinking I could get away with it.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

You build a thousand castles, a thousand sanctuaries, you are nothing; you build a library, you are everything!

They go in not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

I refuse to use the computers if Google is on them.'Librarian: 'Okay.''--'Librarian: '--''--'Librarian: 'Enjoy your day!

The library in 2020 will be ruled by geeks. In my happy vision for the future, libraries are ruled by benign geek librarian overlords and the world is full of awesome.

Because I'm the kind of girl who fantasizes about being trapped in a library overnight.

Desire overwhelmed me once she had gone. But it was not a desire for Homer. I had to return to the library. I could already smell the books' muskiness and in my mind turned over pages with as many differing textures as a forest; pages that were brittle and fragile which had to be coaxed to turn; pages that were soft and scented, presenting their words as if the were a gift in the palm of a hand, and pages that fell open heavily of their own accord as if weighted by the importance of their message. But more than anything else I was compelled by their mystery, by all the stories they had yet to tell me.'I have to go to the library, Homer. I have to be with the books.

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.

A man's library opens up his character to the world.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

Have you really read all those books in your room?”Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.

A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there’s this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady—that iconoclastic lady—was with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you said library, but she didn’t make the library. People made the library. That’s what made a library. Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books.

I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that's quickly giving way to modern technology.

Zander was always sneaking off to the library to get more books ... Guy would read anything. Said books were more interesting than people.

Don't be afraid to go to your library and read every book as long as any document does not offend your own ideas of decency.

Censors don’t want children exposed to ideas different from their own. If every individual with an agenda had his/her way, the shelves in the school library would be close to empty.

Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind.

A library always housed a trove of undiscovered friendships and forays, and a bookstore, a place where those temporary connections might become a constancy, must always hold a charm over any scholar’s heart.

Every library should try to complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.

I wanted a library like this...[] A cave of words that I'd made myself.

Elizabeth laughed and pushed her father's shoulder. "Go, Papa, and be kind to him. I love him so. And it would be to your advantage to be on his good side." Mr. Bennet raised his eyebrows. "Oh, and why is that?" Because I have seen both his libraries in London and at Pemberley, Papa."Interested and amused, Mr. Bennet said, "Ahh, and are they very grand, Lizzy?"A more exquisite sight you will not see," she assured him.

The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead.

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

Yet there in the library, Hamish and I climbed the bright ladder of the body, as if it were sky and we a deafening. twisting flock of birds that could never fall to earth.

I stubbed my toe just as someone dropped a book into the inside drop box. As I yelped and howled in pain, a child on the other side said, 'Mommy, I think we hurt the book!

I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.

For a long while they are silent, thinking about abstract things like control and what it means to love an institution that is defined by loss, because a library is such a space and their duty is to encourage the books to leave.

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

The library is not, as some would have it, a place for the retiring of disposition or faint of heart. It is not an ivory tower or a quiet room in a sanitarium facing away from the afternoon sun. It is, rather, a command center, a power base. A board room, a war room. An Oval Office for all who preside over their own destinies. One does not retreat from the world here; one prepares to join it at an advantage.

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

A library after closing is a lonely place. It is heart-poundingly silent, and the rows of shelves create an almost unfathomable number of dark and creepy corners.

An old librarian once said to me, " whatever we deal with, coming here is always a visual reward.

I love to go the library to borrow books. But I also enjoyed buying books to create my sacred library.